Abstract
Arthur, the ‘once and future king’ has a tenacious grasp on the political imagination ofEngland, supplying a figure representative of national identity from the Middle Ages to the present day. Malory’s Morte Darthur, which transformed the sprawling thirteenth-century French Vulgate Cycle romances for fifteenth-century English readers, is often seen as the culmination of the medieval Arthurian tradition and a consolidation of Arthur’s reputation as a perfect chivalric ruler. Yet Malory relies on a contested political language to create his Arthurian world. The fractured vocabulary he deploys is shared with contemporary authors and regis- ters the collective crisis of rule and national identity in England in the years c. 1399–1485. Recovering this contested language, I demonstrate that Malory’s Arthur, far from representing an ideal medieval monarch, manifests structural inconsistencies and political flaws. Malory’s work is not an escape from the turmoil of civil war into the mythical Arthurian past. Rather, in its interest in the problems of kingship articulated in a commonly held lexicon, it is an active participant in the tussle over politi- cal ideas during the Wars of the Roses. By investigating language under pressure, I attend to the shared experiences and concepts of fifteenth- century political life that Malory responds to, enacts, and alters as he colonizes the familiar genre of Arthurian romance.
Yet som men say in many partys of Inglonde that kynge Arthure ys nat dede, but had by the wyll of Oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I woll nat say that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde sey: here in thys worlde he chaunged hys lyff And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the tumbe thys [vers]:
Hic IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS1
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Notes
Terence McCarthy, “Le Morte Darthur and Romance,” in Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches, ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), 149.
Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 3–6, 10–13; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 1–11.
Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 160.
Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956), 60.
Lord Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ed. J. M. Gray (London: Penguin, 1983, repr., 1996), Merlin and Vivien, 54. Moll, Before Malory, 3; Mark Girouard, Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 178–94.
N. F. Blake, Caxton and His World (New York: London House and Maxwell, 1969), 110–11; D. Thomas Hanks Jr., “Textual Harassment: Caxton, de Worde and Malory’s Morte Darthur,” in Re-viewing the “Morte DarthurTexts, Contexts, Characters and Themes, Arthurian Studies 60, ed. K. S. Whetter and Raluca Radulescu (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 30; Kevin Grimm, “The Reception of Malory’s Morte Darthur: Medieval and Modern,” Quondam et Futurus 2, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 7–8. Grimm rightly emphasizes that it is Lancelot and not Arthur who holds the reader’s attention.
Robert H. Wilson, Characterisation in Malory: A Comparison with His Sources (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1934), 119.
For examples see Edward D. Kennedy, “Malory and His English Sources,” in Aspects of Malory, Arthurian Studies 1, ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1981), 44; Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (London: Macmillan, 1983), 109–12; Hyonjin Kim, The Knight without the Sword: A Social Landscape of Malorian Chivalry, Arthurian Studies 45 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 61–62; K. S. Whetter, “The Historicity of Combat in Le Morte Darthur,” in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P. J. C. Field, Arthurian Studies 57, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 262; Kenneth Hodges, “Guinevere’s Politics in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104, no. 1 (2005): 55. Peter Korrel, An Arthurian Triangle: A Study of the Origin, Development and Characterization of Arthur, Guinevere and Modred (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984), 252–69 points out that Arthur shows reprehensible qualities as well as noble ones, but concludes that the inconsistent picture of Arthur is a product of Malory’s lack of control over his sources. Laura K. Bedwell, “The Failure of Justice, the Failure of Arthur,” Arthuriana 21, no. 3 (2011): 3–22 contributes to the picture of Arthur’s kingship, suggesting justice is problematic in the Arthurian realm, but sees Arthur’s accession, coronation, and some aspects of his rule in a positive light.
Elizabeth T. Pochoda, Arthurian Propaganda: “Le Morte Darthur” as an Historical Ideal of Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), 54–58, 66, 79–81. Pochoda sees the Arthurian story as a means for Malory to press a didactic program of political morality on his readers, although she goes on to expose the flaws of the chivalric ideal.
Mark Lambert, Malory: Style and Vision in “Le Morte Darthur” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 63–65; Andrea Clough, “Malory’s Morte Darthur: The ‘Hoole Book,’” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 14 (1986): 136–56; Felicity Riddy, Sir Thomas Malory (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987), 98–99; Helen Barr, “Contemporary Events,” in A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature, ed. Marilyn Corrie (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 204–6.
Dorsey Armstrong, “Mapping Malory’s Morte: The (Physical) Place and (Narrative) Space of Cornwall,” Arthurian Literature 29 (2012): 173.
Kenneth Hodges, “Why Malory’s Launcelot Is Not French: Region, Nation and Political Identity,” PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 557–60.
John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 364–66.
D. S. Brewer, “The hoole book,” in Essays on Malory, ed. J. A. W. Bennett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 41–63; Clough, “Malory’s Morte” 139; Barr, “Contemporary Events,” 204–6.
P. J. C. Field, Romance and Chronicle: A Study of Malory’s Prose Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 7.
Vinaver, introduction to Works, lvii-lxiv; Larry D. Benson, Malory’s “Morte Darthur” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 28–33 also emphasizes the principle of selection and the balance in the structure of the tales. Bonnie Wheeler, “Romance and Parataxis and Malory: The Case of Sir Gawain’s Reputation,” in Arthurian Literature XII, ed. James P. Carley and Felicity Riddy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 111–12.
Thomas H. Crofts, Malory’s Contemporary Audience: The Social Reading of Romance in Late Medieval England, Arthurian Studies 66 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006).
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© 2014 Ruth Lexton
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Lexton, R. (2014). Introduction. In: Contested Language in Malory’s Morte Darthur. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353627_1
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